Case Studies

Customer experience is a key competitive differentiator for airlines, and increasingly depends on digital channels. How could American Airlines meet its customers’ appetite for instant information and services?

Qualcomm’s IT staff found performance and manageability of existing large data warehouses were becoming difficult as data volumes and business demands increased. IT staff was challenged in responding quickly enough to new business projects.

Hardware

DS8880 is an enterprise storage system designed to enable your infrastructure for systems of insight with high-performance, high-capacity, secure storage for the most demanding mission-critical environments.

The IBM Power System E850 is designed for data and analytics, delivers secure, reliable performance in a compact 4-socket system. It can flexibly scale to rapicly respond to changing business needs. It can also reduce IT costs through application consolidation, higher availability and virtualization to yield over 70% utilization.

Software

IBM Watson IoT Platform can help you get a quick start on your next Internet of Things project. It is a fully managed, cloud-hosted service designed to make it simple to derive value from your Internet of Things devices. It provides capabilities such as device registration, connectivity, control, rapid visualization and storage of Internet of Things data.

Implementing a powerful search engine in your web or mobile app is easier than you think. Simple Search Service is an IBM Bluemix app that enables you to quickly and securely create a faceted search engine. Learn how to expose this API and bring search into your apps.

Suppliers

IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation that manufactures and markets computer hardware, middleware and software, and offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is intent on leading the development of a global data field.Year founded: 1911Revenue: $92.7 billion (2014)NYSE: IBM

VAI is a leading independent mid-market ERP software developer renowned for its flexible solutions and ability to automate critical business functions for the distribution, manufacturing, specialty retail and service sectors. An IBM Premier Business Partner, VAI is the 2012 IBM Beacon Award Winner for Outstanding Solutions for Midsize Businesses. VAI continues to innovate with new solutions that leverage analytics, business intelligence, mobility and cloud technology to help customers make more informed business decisions in real-time and empower their mobile workforces.

Watson is a question answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO and industrialist Thomas J. Watson. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy!. In 2011, Watson competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. Watson received the first place prize of $1 million.Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage including the full text of Wikipedia, but was not connected to the Internet during the game. For each clue, Watson's three most probable responses were displayed on the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game's signaling device, but had trouble in a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words.In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson software system's first commercial application would be for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in conjunction with health insurance company WellPoint. IBM Watson's former business chief Manoj Saxena says that 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance.

Organizations

The Industrial Internet Consortium was founded in March 2014 to bring together the organizations and technologies necessary to accelerate the growth of the Industrial Internet by identifying, assembling and promoting best practices. Membership includes small and large technology innovators, vertical market leaders, researchers, universities and government organizations.Industrial Internet Consortium Working Groups coordinate and establish the priorities and enabling technologies of the Industrial Internet in order to accelerate market adoption and drive down the barriers to entry. There are currently 19 Working Groups and teams, broken into 7 broad areas: • Business Strategy and Solution Lifecycle• Legal• Marketing• Membership• Security• Technology• TestbedsThese groups are comprised of Industrial Internet Consortium member company representatives. Member companies can assign an unlimited number of individuals to the Working Groups, which follows the one vote, one company rule.Testbeds are a major focus and activity of the Industrial Internet Consortium and its members. The Testbed Working Group accelerates the creation of testbeds for the Industrial Internet and serves as the advisory body for testbed proposal activities for our members. It is the centralized group which collects testbed ideas from our member companies and provides the members with systematic yet flexible guidance for new testbed proposals. Our testbeds are where the innovation and opportunities of the Industrial Internet – new technologies, new applications, new products, new services, new processes – can be initiated, thought through, and rigorously tested to ascertain their usefulness and viability before coming to market. Learn more about testbeds in general and specific testbeds below.

Object Management Group (OMG) is international, open membership, not-for-profit technology standards consortium. OMG standards are driven by vendors, end-users, academic institutions and government agencies. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies and an even wider range of industries. OMG’s modeling standards, including the Unified Modeling Language® (UML®) and Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®), enable powerful visual design, execution and maintenance of software and other processes. OMG also hosts organizations such as the user-driven information-sharing Cloud Standards Customer Council™ (CSCC™) and the IT industry software quality standardization group, the Consortium for IT Software Quality™ (CISQ™). OMG also manages the Industrial Internet Consortium, the public-private partnership that was formed in 2014 with AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM, and Intel to forward the development, adoption, and innovation of the Industrial IoT.Our members include hundreds of organizations including software end-users in over two dozen vertical markets (from finance to healthcare and automotive to insurance) and virtually every large organization in the technology industry. OMG’s one organization- one vote policy ensures that every member organization- whether large or small- has an effective voice in our voting process. At OMG, specification adoption is the starting point rather than the end of the process. Our “No Shelf-ware” policy bars all proposed specifications that do not have an implementation plan from being adopted by OMG. This guarantees that all OMG specifications are immediately useable. Furthermore, we do not just focus on the specification itself - we focus on the whole product: with corresponding seminars, workshops, certification, books and more! OMG hosts four technical meetings throughout the year. These meetings give OMG members and interested nonmembers the opportunity to collaborate in a centralized location, learn about technology standards products and processes at tutorials, and attend special information day events on current trending hot topics. While technical meetings provide a centralized location for Task Forces and Working Groups to work together, they are merely checkpoints with the bulk of the work between members taking place electronically via email, teleconferences, and on wikis.In addition to technical meetings, OMG acts as event producer for conferences and workshops for its members around the world, including the Internationalization & Unicode Conference.OMG maintains liaison relationships with dozens of other organizations including ISO (which publishes many OMG standards without edits), Health Level Seven (HL7), and the Data Transparency Coalition.

Use Cases

Asset Health Management refers to the process of analyzing the health of an asset as determined by operational requirements. The health of an asset in itself relates to the asset's utility, its need to be replaced, and its need for maintenance. It can be broken down into three key components:Monitoring: Tracking the current operating status of the asset.Diagnostic Analysis: Comparing real-time data to historical data in order to detect anomalies.Prognostic Analysis: Identifying and prioritizing specific actions to maximize the remaining useful life of the asset based on analysis of real-time and historical data.

The aim of predictive maintenance (PdM) is first to predict when equipment failure might occur, and secondly, to prevent the occurrence of the failure by performing maintenance. Monitoring for future failure allows maintenance to be planned before the failure occurs. Ideally, predictive maintenance allows the maintenance frequency to be as low as possible to prevent unplanned reactive maintenance, without incurring costs associated with doing too much preventive maintenance.Predictive maintenance uses condition-monitoring equipment to evaluate an asset’s performance in real-time. A key element in this process is the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT allows for different assets and systems to connect, work together, and share, analyze and action data.

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are devices or software applications that monitor network or system activities for malicious activities or policy violations and send reports to a management station.ID systems are being developed in response to the increasing number of attacks on major sites and networks, including those of the Pentagon, the White House, NATO, and the U.S. Defense Department. The safeguarding of security is becoming increasingly difficult, because the possible technologies of attack are becoming ever more sophisticated; at the same time, less technical ability is required for the novice attacker, because proven past methods are easily accessed through the Web.